By CELESTINE BOHLEN

Published: March 11, 2002

In 16th-century Europe tapestries were literally the stuff of kings; or to be more precise, kings, queens, popes, noblemen and anyone else ready to spend a small fortune (roughly the cost of a warship of the day) to cover their walls with intricate woven hangings made with silk and gold.

Yet despite their worth, moving tapestries from castle to castle in those days was a cinch. ''The whole point of tapestries was that you could roll them up and chuck them on the back of a cart,'' said Thomas Campbell, an associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Not anymore, as Mr. Campbell learned after spending four years assembling 41 priceless tapestries from all over Europe for ''Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence,'' an exhibition that opens at the Met tomorrow and runs through June 19.

These days tapestries, when they travel, are rolled around giant cylinders, layered with special tissue paper, wrapped in high-tech materials, packed in special crates that maintain a steady temperature and loaded onto cargo planes.

For the Met exhibition several of the largest tapestries -- measuring up to 30 feet in their crates -- proved to be too big to fit in the elevators and had to be walked in off Fifth Avenue through the museum's main entrance and up the Grand Staircase.

So it is no wonder that tapestries now are rarely sent on the road. ''People send pictures around the world at the drop of a hat, but there have been very few tapestry exhibitions,'' Mr. Campbell said. ''People who deal with textiles are much more conservative. It is a very different mindset.''

The exhibition at the Metropolitan is the first major tapestry show in the United States since the 1970's, and because of the logistical complications of packing and moving the giant masterpieces, not to mention their size, it is making only the one stop.

Not only have most of these tapestries -- including some of the masterpieces of their age -- never crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but there are several that for the past hundred years or so have literally not seen the light of day. Such is the case of the Throne Baldachin, woven in Brussels in 1561, a canopy made up of eight separate tapestry components, which was taken to Vienna for a royal wedding in 1736. There it has remained, most recently in the reserves of the Kunsthistorisches Museum where it has been put on display only once in the last century (and even then the top part of the canopy stayed in storage).

The bright blues and reds of the baldachin, now mounted in its entirety in the last room of the Tisch Galleries, are a clear testament to a tapestry's love of the dark.

''That is the only argument that we have for not hanging them,'' said Rotraud Bauer, the Kunsthistorisches curator who came to New York with the baldachin and other pieces from what is considered one of the richest tapestry collections in Europe.

The colors of this baldachin stand out in brilliant contrast to the muted tones of most of the other tapestries -- ''Martha Stewart colors,'' Mr. Campbell said -- which are a direct result of aging. In the 18th and 19th centuries many of these magnificent tapestries were relegated to the ignoble role of background, practically wallpaper, to cover dank walls in cold empty palaces.

But when they were made, these hangings -- all of them woven between 1420 and 1560 -- were considered among the most treasured pieces in some of the best collections of the Renaissance.

During the medieval period, weavers copied a full-scale colored pattern, known as the cartoon, and traced it onto the bare warp. The weavers then passed the different-colored threads that were wrapped around a hand-held shuttle in between the even and odd warp threads. This was a labor-intensive process. A large wool tapestry measuring 15 by 24 feet would have taken five weavers about eight months. Finer materials like gold or silk could require double that time.

Made in Northern Europe on the basis of Italian designs, Renaissance tapestries have been called ''portable frescoes,'' because they offer the same visually dense illustrations of biblical or mythical scenes as frescoes. Henry VIII of England was a particularly enthusiastic buyer: his collection of more than 2,000 tapestries would have measured 5 kilometers, if laid end to end. (Of course he had 14 palaces to decorate.)

Given their size and their prominence at royal ceremonies, tapestries were seen as a great way to advertise the power and glory of their owners. But they were also highly valued because they were expensive, more expensive even than many of the great paintings that were being produced at the same time. Unlike medieval tapestries, which were mostly made of wool, those made during the Renaissance were laced with gold and silver, which in some cases had been brought to Europe from the New World.

When Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael in 1515 to make the cartoons for a set of 10 tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (of which three are in the Met show, two of them lent by the Vatican), he was offering 1,600 to 2,000 ducats for each tapestry: the total cost was five times what Michelangelo was paid to paint the chapel's ceiling. The 1,500 English pounds Henry VIII paid for the ''Story of David'' was the equivalent of what he had to pay for a battleship, while Charles V, the Hapsburg emperor, had to wait for his wife's dowry before he could pay in full for ''Nobilitas,'' the sixth in a set known as the Honors.

Now the property of the Patrimonio Nacional collection in Spain, the giant ''Nobilitas'' -- which measures 28 by 16 feet -- was lying on the floor one day last week, covering almost an entire room in the Tisch Galleries, waiting its turn to be slowly and regally raised on the wall.

The first task was to match a six-inch-wide strip of Velcro stitched along the top of the back of the tapestry, to another strip of equal size nailed onto a plank of wood. Then the tapestry was carefully folded, pleat by pleat, on top of the board, which was then hoisted to the top of the wall on two special machines. After the board was put in place on the wall, the tapestry was carefully unfolded and lowered, again by machine: simply to let it fall would be to risk putting a sudden and uneven weight on its fragile warp threads.

(The invention of Velcro revolutionized the tapestry-hanging business in the 1970's, replacing the centuries-old technique of hanging by hooks. But Nabuko Kajitani, who heads the Met's textile department and was overseeing the hanging process, said that its use was still disputed by some curators. ''There is always a debate going on,'' she said.)

Even in the 15th and 16th centuries, hanging tapestries was considered a tedious, laborious process, although transporting them was relatively simple. Fruosino da Panzano, an agent for Giovanni de' Medici, who was scouring Europe to find worthy tapestries for his master, came across a large one depicting the story of Samson, which was on sale for 700 ducats.

He rejected it on two grounds: ''because there was a great quantity of dead people in it,'' and because ''it would be a chore to stretch it in your big room.''

Photos: The unfolding of ''The Sacrifice of Isaac'' for the tapestry exhibition opening tomorrow at the Metropolitan. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. E3); Top, hanging ''The Miraculous Draft of Fishes'' at the Met. Above, carrying a priceless tapestry to the exhibition. (Photographs by Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. E1)